Total War: Rome 2 to feature 117 factions, 500 unit types

Game to have double Shogun 2's map regions.

Out of GDC last week comes the news that Total War: Rome 2 is going to be a fairly complicated operation, with 117 different factions present in the single-player campaign.

Creative Assembly are also promising over 500 unit types, as well as 183 map regions — almost double that of Shogun 2.

How many of the different units and factions are just pallet swaps, and to what degree it will be noticeable mechanically, is not yet known — but it’s impressive stuff nonetheless. The last major faction revealed was Egypt, with only one left to go.

I just really really hope they perfect an in-depth diplomacy system so that all these added factions will not just be a named rebel settlement. In addition Sega always managed to produce a crappy vanilla A.I. system so modders have to jump in to fix it. Please oh please make this one perfect :)

Most of those factions have to be Tribal, Historically there weren’t even 117 legitimate kingdoms in the world at the time. We know there are 8 playable factions. This is the number they gave us.. What they’re talking about now are NOT factions, their wording needs to be changed.. What they are talking about are “Tribes” and Sub-Factions.

God I hate CA’s PR people. They wonder why so many got mislead by Empire and Shogun 2.

God I hate CA’s PR people. They wonder why so many got mislead by Empire and Shogun 2.

Factions does seem like poor wording although I am sure any history buff would know that almost all of them would be minor tribal or barbarian “factions”. Worst part could be if the small collectives ally into a larger faction which I am fairly sure I read can happen in Rome 2.

But more importantly does anyone truly expect a total war game with 117 factions to actually function properly at all.. You hit the turn button and wait an hour… come the fuck on people you know better than that. CA will not be able to ever deliver on that because Warscape (the engine they’re using) is not capable of it. It can barely even handle 30 factions. (most of them not playable in the case of Empire).

Most of those 117 factions are no doubt going to be neutral city-states, existing on the map solely to be taken by the larger factions, just as we saw in Empire. I also wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re counting differently named rebel factions as separate as well.

500 unit ‘types’ is interesting language. Of course, what we know they’re trying not to say is: 500 unit variations. Different colour schemes, slightly altered stats between cavalry units, adding ‘light’ in front of infantry unit names, these will all count towards the 500.

As for map regions, 183 is enough for the playable factions to start out with the usual handful of cities and the rest to be made up by city states and minor factions with one or two towns. Big whoop.

Another CA game, another empty hype train, another let-down. Don’t be fooled.

What’s with all the hate? Of course we all know that it means a whole bunch of small tribes and city states. It still adds variation to the game and makes it historically accurate. Why is that so terrible?

Look The reason why people are pissed is because for 4 games now, CA has lied and mislead their way to get to where they are today, with misleading advertisements and extremely dodgy business practices. You think they’re telling the truth, you think what they’re explaining to be interesting… NONE OF IT WILL WORK PROPERLY. Mods will come along sure, but none of them will ever truly fix the game (see DarthMod) they’ll be good efforts but they won’t fix everything..

To this day All of their warscape games still crash frequently, Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2 and FOTS, and to this day patch support has been lacking (though at least many of the features in FOTS were ported back into Shogun 2- to the disappointment of those people that bought FOTS specifically for those features, but at least they did it without charging us for it which is rare- see the blood DLC for example a feature that was standard in ME2 but in Shogun 2 you had to pay for). And also lets not forget their bullshit Mobile offering that forced you to buy their broken game just to get a DLC for the bigger Shogun 2 game on PC.. they then brought that mobile game to PC because… hey we just hit the consumer up once and forced them to buy it… now we’ll hit em again.

They do this because they can, they do it because they have a monopoly over the historical RTT genre. Don’t buy the hype, the best thing you can do is buy this as cheap as they’re prepared to sell it.. that way you hopefully won’t get burned as bad… you’ll still get burned though.

I have 500+ hours logged between the last few of their games. So not a hardcore gamer but I’ve played enough to know its flaws. As for crashing frequently, that’s a bit of an over statement. Over the course of the above hours I have had maybe a dozen or so crashes, no more than a lot of other games I have played. Don’t get me wrong I don’t for a minute claim that they are a perfect publisher. My point is why the hurt about their bragging about 117 factions? It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before (and often on a far worse scale). I don’t think anyone is getting mislead about the content of the game.

You’re absolutely correct that they have a monopoly on the genre, but who’s fault is that? At least someone is producing games in this genre.

I see the rent-a-crowds from TWCenter are present here too. I shouldn’t be thankful for anything. Its only a matter of time before someone like Lordz, TaleWorlds, CryTek (they own Knights of Honor) ect develops something to compete against them. If CryTek brought back KoH they’d mop the floor with CA.

shouldn’t have to pirate, if their demos were at least somewhat solid then we wouldn’t need to dispute these facts as they’d be readily shown in a campaign environment (fucking Historical battles don’t count! contrary to what CA themselves think.. “YEAH THAT IS INGAME” not in the context your consumers are thinking of though- they’re thinking siege of Carthage will work in a campaign environment.. I’m certain it won’t.)